Ships
- IJN Hatsuyuki Captain from 12 May 1942
Tatsuya Yamaguchi (山口達也) was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the fifty-second class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, whom the Navy's lists record as coming from Tokyo. He commanded the torpedo boat Kari (December 1938 to November 1939), the destroyer Hakaze (November 1939 to November 1940) and the destroyer Hatsuyuki (12 May 1942 to 30 May 1943), and then Subchaser Division 32, a unit of three small convoy escorts based at Truk. In Hatsuyuki he took part in the Guadalcanal campaign from the first troop runs of late August 1942 to the evacuation of the island in February 1943. He was killed at Truk during the American carrier raids of 17–18 February 1944 and is carried in the Navy's records as a captain. He was a lieutenant commander when he took Hatsuyuki, a commander from 1 November 1943, and a captain in the Navy's record of his death.
The Navy's rosters give his home as Tokyo. His date of birth, his parents, his schooling before the Naval Academy and any family of his own are not recorded in any source that could be examined.
He entered the Naval Academy at Etajima, the island school on the Inland Sea where the Navy trained its officers, and graduated with the fifty-second class on 24 July 1924. The class had 236 graduates. The compiled register that records class standing places him 235th of the 236. Among his classmates were Mitsuo Fuchida, who would lead the first wave of aircraft at Pearl Harbor, the airman Minoru Genda, and Prince Takamatsu, the Emperor's younger brother.
The personnel summary shows him a midshipman from the day of graduation, an ensign on 1 December 1925, a lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 December 1927 and a lieutenant on 1 December 1931. He was gunnery officer of the destroyer Harukaze, a ship of the second Kamikaze class launched in 1922; the record does not give the date he joined her, only that the post ended in October 1934. On 22 October 1934 he became gunnery officer of the minelayer Itsukushima, completed in 1929. In the summer of 1937 he joined the new destroyer Asashio while she was being fitted out at Sasebo, and he is listed as her first gunnery officer from 1 August 1937; she was commissioned on 31 August. On 15 November 1937 he left her to become torpedo officer and a division officer of the old minelayer Katsuriki, a ship completed in January 1917, twenty years before he joined her. The personnel summary shows him promoted lieutenant commander on 15 November 1938.
His first commands came with that promotion. On 15 December 1938 he took the torpedo boat Kari, a ship of some 840 tons that had been commissioned in September 1937, and he held her until 15 November 1939. From December 1938 until 10 January 1939 he was also in charge, as an additional duty, of her sister Sagi. On 15 November 1939 he took the destroyer Hakaze, one of the Minekaze class, a destroyer of 1920 that had served on the central China coast since 1938. He commanded her for exactly a year. Between 20 March and 15 November 1940 he was also, as an additional duty, the captain of the destroyer Yukaze, which went into reserve on 20 March. His first command had come more than fourteen years after he left Etajima.
For the eighteen months after November 1940 the official rosters used here are silent. A list compiled in 2006 from the memories of surviving members of the Academy's seventy-second class, which entered on 1 December 1940, names a Lieutenant Commander Tatsuya Yamaguchi of the fifty-second class as the officer of one of the first-year companies. It gives no dates. If the recollection is right, part of this interval was spent at Etajima as a company officer, in charge of first-year cadets, rather than at sea.
On 12 May 1942 he took command of Hatsuyuki, a "special type" destroyer of the Fubuki class, completed in 1929. She belonged to the 11th Destroyer Division and had returned to Kure on 22 April 1942 from the opening months of the war, which she had spent supporting the invasions of Malaya and the Netherlands Indies and the Andaman Islands operations. Under her new captain the division escorted Admiral Yamamoto's main body at Midway on 4–5 June, and then a troop convoy to Amami-Oshima. In July it was sent toward Burma for a planned raiding operation in the Indian Ocean; the American landing on Guadalcanal on 7 August cancelled it, and the division went instead to Davao, Truk and Rabaul.
From late August Hatsuyuki was part of the destroyer runs to Guadalcanal, steaming from the Shortlands at night to land troops and supplies and be gone before daylight brought American aircraft. She made troop-carrying runs on 27–29 August and 31 August. On 4–5 September she sailed with Yudachi and Murakumo, while a second section carried troops to Taivu; the Japanese records credit the two groups with landing about a thousand soldiers of the Ichiki and Aoba detachments. Yudachi, Hatsuyuki and Murakumo went into the anchorage off Lunga Point and sank two American destroyer-transports, Gregory and Little. The Japanese Wikipedia account, drawing on the Eighth Fleet's report, says that afterwards the Japanese ships fired on men swimming toward the shore; the sources available do not say what part, if any, Hatsuyuki's guns took in that. She made further runs on 7 and 16 September and went to the help of a torpedoed transport on 19 September. On 1 October, avoiding a near-miss in an air attack, she jammed her rudder and had to withdraw to the Shortlands. In the first days of October she was used in the barge supply system, towing landing craft and surveying the waters around New Georgia.
On the night of 11–12 October, in the Battle of Cape Esperance, she sailed with the heavy cruiser Kinugasa in the force sent to bombard the American airfield under Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto. It met an American cruiser and destroyer force under Rear Admiral Norman Scott; Fubuki and the cruiser Furutaka were lost and Goto was killed. Hatsuyuki was hit forward above the waterline, which limited her to 24 knots. Ordered to rescue what she could, she found Furutaka so heavily listed that she could not go alongside, and began picking up men after the cruiser had gone down. She took on more than five hundred survivors, left boats and spars for the rest and withdrew. In the following weeks she escorted the damaged cruiser Aoba to Truk, then escorted Kinugasa and Sendai in support of the troop runs, and on 6–9 November took Sendai back to Truk carrying evacuees from Guadalcanal.
On 12–15 November, in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, she first escorted Admiral Takeo Kurita's support force and then joined Admiral Nobutake Kondo's bombardment force. In the second night action she and the light cruiser Nagara went in against American destroyers; the Americans lost Walke, Benham and Preston, and Gwin was damaged. She reached Truk on 18 November. In December she escorted the carrier Hiyo to Kure and docked there, and two twin 13-millimetre machine guns were fitted forward of her bridge.
The new year brought convoy work and the end of the island campaign. From 8 January 1943 she escorted a convoy of the 20th Division from Pusan, by way of Palau, to Wewak in New Guinea. From 31 January to 9 February she screened the fleet north of the Solomons during the evacuation of Guadalcanal. In mid-February she touched a reef at Kavieng and went to Rabaul for repairs. On 3 March, after the Lae convoy had been sunk in the Bismarck Sea, she went out from Kavieng to meet the destroyers returning from that battle, passed fuel across and took survivors aboard. By the Japanese Wikipedia's account some 2,700 men were put aboard Hatsuyuki and Uranami, which carried them to Rabaul, arriving on the morning of 4 March. After convoy escorts to Kure she docked there from 21 March to 25 April, then escorted the carrier Taiyo from Yokosuka to Singapore and back to Sasebo in May.
On 30 May 1943 the destroyer records show him relieved by Lieutenant Commander Yoshiro Sugihara. In his year in command Hatsuyuki had been through Cape Esperance, the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and the evacuation, and nothing in the surviving record says what he said or wrote about any of it. No diary, letter or memoir of his has been found. The ship went back to Rabaul, fought in the Battle of Kula Gulf on 5–6 July and was sunk beside a pier at Kahili, on Bougainville, in an air raid on 17 July 1943, with 120 dead.
The Navy had appointed him, in May 1943, commander of Subchaser Division 32. The division had three boats, the numbered subchasers CH-28, CH-29 and CH-30, each of about 420 tons. They had worked in New Guinea and the Solomons in 1942, and from May 1943 they belonged to the 4th Base Force at Truk, from which they spent the rest of the year escorting convoys among Truk, Rabaul, Palau, Kwajalein, Saipan and Nauru. On 19 July 1943, when an American submarine sank a transport south of Wake, the division's three boats counterattacked without result. On 1 November the Navy promoted him commander. The next day the American submarine Haddock fired at CH-28; her crew saw three torpedo tracks pass close by.
The end came when the American fast carrier force attacked Truk on 17 and 18 February 1944. Task Force 58, with five fleet and four light carriers, launched strikes of at least 150 aircraft about once an hour for two days and sank, by the tabular records' count, thirty-one transports and ten naval vessels. The division's boats were scattered when it fell. CH-28 had left Truk on the night of 15 February to escort the damaged cruiser Agano, which was torpedoed on the 16th and sank early on the 17th; CH-28 picked up 125 of her men. CH-30 was at sea with a convoy bound for Palau. CH-29 was ordered at 5.31 on the morning of the 17th to meet a convoy at sea and was sunk by aircraft, on the 18th by the tabular record. None of the sources says which boat, or which place ashore, he was in. A compiled roster of the fifty-second class says he was killed on 17 February 1944 while with the division.
The Navy marked his promotion to captain, effective 18 February 1944, with the notation that he had been killed in action. The division was disbanded in the spring of 1944 and its remaining boats passed to the base force. CH-28 survived until 1 February 1945, when American fighters sank her off Luzon.
Nothing is recorded of his wife or children, if he had any, his age at death or where his remains lie. What survives is the sequence of ships, from Harukaze to the three subchasers; a year in command of a destroyer through the worst of the fighting for Guadalcanal; and a place in the long list of his Academy class, in which he graduated 235th of 236 and was killed a captain.